Bill O’Reilly and the Invention of the Internet

Last night Fox‘s Bill O’Reilly (3/1/12) asked guest Tamara Draut from the think tank Demos to name just one green energy success story. She tried to resist the question, explaining that in some cases, the benefits of government funding can come much later. Like, she mentioned, what happened with the Internet.

But O’Reilly wasn’t going to let those facts get in the way:

O’REILLY: Let me break this to you. The Internet–

DRAUT: It’s too short of a time frame.

O’REILLY: — private money.

DRAUT: No, it was public money. Department of Defense, federal money.

O’REILLY: Hold it. Have you never heard of Microsoft? You have never heard of Steve Jobs? That’s what did that.

DRAUT: But technology making Microsoft possible came from the Department of Defense.

O’REILLY: It came from the Department of Defense because they were doing space stuff and they discovered stuff that brought down which was then sold to private.

Makes perfect sense. Space stuff.

For the record, the first version of the Internet is generally considered to be the ARPANET, launched by the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969. Microsoft was founded in 1975 and Steve Jobs launched Apple a year later. Neither company was particularly involved with the Internet before the 1990s.

Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

In fact, Microsoft was very late in coming to Internet applications; Jobs was notably skeptical for a few years about the value of the World Wide Web. O’Reilly is totally ignorant about this topic, as he is on almost every topic he talks about.

I worked for a DARPA Contractor in the 80’s and early 90’s. I remember the ARPANET from the mid-80’s. It was all text. Not like it is today but it was the first time scientists were connected via a computer network to one another.

O’Reilly relies on his arrogant and bullying style to forward his ideas, so in his mind, facts are secondary to the point that he wants to make. He makes it past the moment and then on to the next topic. By the time one researches and confirms the facts (that they knew to begin with) Bill is down the road and not wanting to be bothered by “someone dwelling on…”. A well used Fox (and Republican) tactic. Don’t bother me with the facts. My “reality” suits my position better.

Another classic case of the empty-headed O’Liely making sh*t up as he goes along.

I’ll bet he doesn’t know the difference between the Internet (advanced version of Arpanet) and the World Wide Web — pretty much invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee…a Brit!

And if that isn’t enough to make O’Liely’s head explode, get a load of this:

“Tim Berners Lee ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬”Â Time 100 People of the Century”. Time Magazine. Retrieved 17 May 2010. “He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web is Berners-Lee’s alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free. .”

That’s right — keep it OPEN, NONPROPRIETARY and FREE — all of the things O’Liely and his puppet masters HATE!

The internet, as we know it, was not invented by the US Military. The Military only had a closed system that was not able to communicate to the outside. It was Tim Berners-Lee at CERN who implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and server via the internet. Berner-Lee is a Brit.

Let’s bring some reality into this discussion. I was an ARPANET user in 1975-77. From a node in Alabama I accessed a server at PARC developing hypertext documents using NLS. NLS was the first application to embody the features that later became HTTP. The concept of protocols was firmly in place. In fact, I recall the announcement of general availabilty of FTP. There were approximately 8 major server locations in the US and Europe on the ARPANET in 1977, all but one or two at major universities. I don’t believe it was ever much more than a research tool until Berners-Lee. The military didn’t use it operationally. It was available to any researcher that could make a case and pay the bill.

In the early 70s I wrote a research/opinion paper on Global Communication and predicted that something like today’s Internet would enhance Globalization, which I believe was the coming thing. The class was a symposium on Jacque Elluel’s “Technological Society.” There was enough information out there at the time to make my points plausible. Why do I think that O’Reilly was still in short pants then? Or just maybe having “short pants.”

Is it something in their water that many Republicans drink? It constantly amazes me how they collectively create ‘facts’ to suit their agendas. They rewrite history without the slightest qualm. They conjure up their own ‘facts’ using them to proselytise the masses. If they hit a nerve with anyone listening to their bombastic diatribes they might sway them to the dark side of the ultra right-wing conservatives called the Republican Party.

even if we ignore who it was who ‘invented’ the internet per se (and it was most definitely a public, not a private endeavor), the commercialization of the net (MS, et alii) were all doing their own proprietary thing and it would have taken much longer to make salable products in this area were it not for the standardizing effect of free server and browser products like Apache and Mozilla. Just think about all the ludicrous patent wars we have over “one-click” and “move finger to the left” and wonder how constant battles in the courts to own various parts of the internet would have slowed down universal acceptance.

Bills point if you saw the whole thing- was the internet is a product of private innovation.Profit motive.
Her point was- it was a product of private use of military technology(Under government control).Well yes and no to both of them.What both forgot to mention was even the military developments came from developmental private outsourced companies sub contracted to the Pentagon.And yes they worked for profit.
Jeep was a military technology in WW2.It spawned all SUVs on the market today.Private industry takes ideas or develops ideas or yes borrows ideas ,from everywhere and anywhere and runs with them.It would be correct to say that the technical structure of the internet ….was developed by private companies either under the military developmental structure,in conjunction but less so within military run labs, or by private companies outside that grouping with an eye to future profit.The running of the internet and its worldwide explosion was clearly a result of private industry and for profit innovators.Capitalism at its very best.Then again another genius far smarter than Bill O or tamara Draut has claimed to of invented it.Our very own Al (hate the beard -hows the assault charge going)Gore.

billo doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about….chetdude got there first up the comment thread but just to repeat the obvious

The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb (no spaces) and was later renamed Nexus. In 1993, Marc Andreesen created a browser that was easy to use and install with the release of Mosaic (later Netscape), “the world’s first popular browser”, which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. Andreesen’s browser sparked the internet boom of the 1990s.

i’d just add [repeating the obvious] that there was no profit motive and microsoft played no role in these innovations.

Rees also said the masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, witnesses could not remember anything unusual, and that the masseuse failed a polygraph examination and would not say whether she was paid by a tabloid newspaper for her story.

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Al Gore’s whole statement never claimed to have invented the Internet, in the sense of writing code or laying fiber-optic cables. He meant only to take credit for the contributions that he made as a member of Congress, contributions that have been lauded by people like Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, who wrote the code that serves as the foundation for the Internet.

Libertarian Declan McCullagh is to blame for coming up with the “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet” lie.

Nazi comparison are, understandably, not welcome in the media generally, but the decline of Germany during the 1030s, as alluded to in such books as William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” and John Toland’s “Adolph Hitler: The Definitive Biography,” suggest where support for such hate-mongers as Bill O’Reilly has already lead us.

Just now some observers are delighted to surmise that none of the current far-right candidates for President could possibly win. By March of 1930, the people of Germany, regardless of party affiliation, had no voice whatever in their government. That is where we are now, with the elected officials of both of our major parties at all levels of government completely at the whim of vested interests.

Fox News is far more dangerous than any of the comments here would suggest, and the michael e comment merely demonstrates that there are “Good Americans” out there eager to believe anything that attacks any group in our society to which they themselves do not belong.

@michael e. yes, private enterpises did develop the technology, but at public expense. It’s doubtful that they would have developed the technology on their own with their own capital. When that publicly funded technology is then turned over to private companies to profit from without paying any royalties to the government (meaning taxpayers who supplied the money), that is capitalism at its worse.

Oh, everyone has forgotten Mr. Babbage and his computer . Sadly, he was a man way ahead of his time and his ideas couldn’t be implemented back then Even IBM did not foresee a public use of computers. : )
However, to IBM’s cedit, they do have WATSON, and happliy, it seems, Mr. O’Reilly, YOU can be easily replaced!
Although, WATSON too might be affected by GIGO, but gosh, Mr. O’Reilly, WATSON doesn’t need a paycheck, COLA raises, health insurance, vacation time, retirement funding, sick days….oh, now we have to worry about outsourcing talking heads…well maybe “worry” is not the right word. Hey, FOX…how does this sound” Nightly Views with WATSON.” Maybe…in 3-D too!

P ness my apologies.Did not know the case had been dropped due to lack of evidence.Several other complaints have surfaced by girls(7) giving him a massage along the exact same lines -but they too will not move forward do to lack of evidence.Um …we do live in a country where you are innocent until PROVEN guilty.So we must accept that…”he did not have sex with those woman”(Billy C :)But if it all the same to you I would tell any Massage therapists to pass on the veep.Pass on Bill Clinton,and pass on that French scumbag who once actually had his hand on the world monetary fund.Mike tyson….Chris brown….Woody allen(I could go on all day)
Did he say he invented the internet.Yup he did.Of course I just thought at the time it was a dumb thing to say by a dumb guy.Nothing more.
Who really did invented it?Spock i think.Remember the one where they time traveled and left advanced tech behind?

xerox, not ibm, was the company that created both a workstation computer [the xerox alto] and later a networked system [the xerox star], but ultimately failed to create a commercially successful product…luckily, a guy named steve jobs saw it in 1979…and had an idea

Sorry, your facts are wrong again there, Michael…A total of three women [including the one discussed above] made claims against Mr. Gore. The additional two were reported by the Enquirer, the same publication that the Portland police suspected paid the woman they investigated.

Al Gore’s whole statement never claimed to have invented the Internet, in the sense of writing code or laying fiber-optic cables. He meant only to take credit for the contributions that he made as a member of Congress, contributions that have been lauded by people like Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, who wrote the code that serves as the foundation for the Internet.

Libertarian Declan McCullagh is to blame for coming up with the “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet” lie.

In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

Meaning, of course, that he headed up and promoted the creation of legislation that led to today’s Internet.

sq is correct. The development of the internet is definitely not an example of pure capitalism. Just like in aerospace, developing this complex technology takes a lot of money in and no money out for a long time. There was no return on the money invested for years and years. This is not something a private enterprise will want to get involved with when spending their own money. If they’re going to develop something, they want a return on their investment ASAP, not ten years later. This is why the gov’t funded these technologies in the their early stages. No one else would. Once the technologies reached a commercially viable stage, then private companies took them the rest of the way. So the reality is not one or the other but a public/private hybrid.

P.Ness are you really quoting the national inquirer?Hot air?Spend more time on the wall street Journal.Publications with more than one paragraph.And that includes google.
EFK…….I found out who it was.It was uncle martin (my favorite martian) Seriously government is our money too is it not.Government is OUR employee.It is the end result of our pure capitalism.We fund it…..not the other way around.The government worked on these technologies for purely military reasons.Just like the WW2 jeep i mentioned.Private industry adapted the whole ball of wax including the militaries input into a marketable idea.Now Im gonna go ride my jeep/SUV.

No sir they were not.Although I think sometimes the NI hits a home run(John Edwards)there are better sources.I did now read the piece you are quoting.There are 3 other woman who were of the same level of first report they stae.The investigation though has pulled 7 out of the woodwork stretching beyond the statute of limitations.The show I saw it on, I do believe pulled from The WS journal.
We must not cast aspersions of course ,but as I said …I would not recommend any woman take his fare .

You’re still wrong…the Gore story was broken by the National Enquirer as the Portland Oregonian clearly states.

“The case was not investigated any further because detectives concluded there was insufficient evidence to support the allegations,” the Portland Police Bureau said in a prepared statement Wednesday, responding to inquiries from all over the world after the National Enquirer broke the story on its website.

P.Ness I think you just said the flippin National Inquirer was the ONLY one to investigate or write about an assault charge on the former VP of this country.Are you really saying that?Or are you saying no one beyond the police of that jurisdiction investigated this? And did you just say that since the government prints the money they own it?(though you actually COULD say they print it and WE own the debt)I will beat you to the super market check out counter.I hear the STAR is the only one writing about Obamas meeting with the Israeli leader.That and a story indicating big foot stole his woman Michelle. Dumb argument for the sake of argument.Read more than Google and the national Inquirer and Rolling stone is my advice to you.But Im not going to tell you what to do.If you have a daughter or a wife please be my guest.Tell them to go into that room with the veep who needs a nice relaxing massage. Garenteed they will be safe as mothers milk.God knows you would believe him over them.He’s the veep.Its nice to be veep